"Night Court Nightmare"
May. 23rd, 2022 04:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dochermes"Night Court Nightmare"
7/9/1996
I.
At the edge of the back wall of the town court house, Jeremy Bane froze into position. Slowing his breathing to its minimum, he waited until his enhanced hearing kicked in after thirty seconds. The town of Alkali Wells in west Texas was quiet at three in the morning. Somewhere a mile away a dog was barking but that was it. As Bane's hearing tuned up, he made out the labored wheeze of a fat man breathing, then the heavy thump of a heartbeat. The scrape of wood against asphalt... the man was shifting his chair. The Dire Wolf listened for another minute, heard the sound of a yawn and fabric rubbing as the man stretched. Then the breathing slowed down. If the guard was not asleep, he was drowsy.
Taking a deep breath himself, the Dire Wolf straightened up. It was a hot humid night without a breeze and he could understand why the guard was drowsy. Good. Bane had crept through the woods to approach the court house from its blind side. The building was on the outskirts of town, a small brick structure painted white, with a parking lot in front and twin poles upon which the flag of Texas and the flag of the United States flew with lights upon them. In the front parking lot was an SUV, two pick-up trucks and a big old Chevy Malibu. He had already paid these vehicles a visit. All of them were in states of extreme disrepair, with enough damage to make it look as if they had come from a war zone.
Well, he thought to himself, a cross-country killing spree was like a war.
A tall gaunt man in his early forties, dressed all in black, Bane was hard to spot in the gloom in any case. In a narrow intense face, his most notable feature was the pair of pale eyes under heavy brows. Right now they gleamed with a predatory eagerness to get underway. He peered cautiously around the edge of the court house toward its rear lot. In that parking lot was a neatly waxed BMW and a equally gleaming Lexus. They would probably belong to the judge and one of the attorneys. Bane took a second to set himself for action. There was no use in waiting. He swung around the corner of the building and pounced on the guard without hesitation.
The man was short and dumpy, wearing worn-out shoes and pants and flannel shirt, none of which had been washed in a long time. He had frizzy black hair with a big bald spot on top. All this Bane saw in a split-second as he leaped upon the man and smashed a hard backhand to the face that threw the guard up out of his wooden chair as if he had been electrocuted. The man fell in a heap and showed no signs of being able to get up by himself any time soon. Bane stepped closer. The guard wasn't breathing. He turned the man over, saw the glassy staring eyes in the stubble-coated face and realized that he had broken the man's neck with that punch.
A little too much force, the Dire Wolf thought to himself reproachfully. I should have better judgement than that. He found a Colt 45 revolver in the man's belt and examined it. The piece had been cleaned and was in good repair, which slightly surprised him. Five bullets, one empty chamber where the hammer rested. Bane put the gun to one side and skimmed through the man's pockets. Three keys on a paper clip, a loose disorganized wad of twenties and tens, an unlabeled bottle filled with oval white pills with a V-shape on one side. In the shirt pocket were two dried human fingers. Bane held them up to the light. They had belonged to a child no older than seven or eight. Judging from the ends, the fingers had not been cut but ripped off by force.
Replacing the gruesome trophies in the flannel shirt, Bane gazed down coldly at the corpse. The guy was a Brewster all right. Now he didn't feel bad about using excessive force. Picking up the Colt, he checked it out again and then opened the plain yellow metal door that read NO ADMITTANCE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He found himself in a tiny vestibule with wall hooks for coats and rubber mats to scrape off muddy shoes. The door in front of him was unlocked so he simply walked into the judge's chambers.
It was a warm, cozy office with bookcases and overstuffed leather furniture and the smell of Scotch and cigars. On one wall was a white Bison skull. Much of the space was taken up by a desk piled with loose papers and manila envelopes, with two chairs arranged in front of it. Lying face down on that desk was the body of a thin, middle-aged man in shirtleeves. The back of his skull was flattened and coated with dried black blood. That was be the Honorable Harold J Richter, Bane thought. The last thing he had seen in life had been a pack of Brewsters charging into his sanctuary.
Alongside one wall was a nicely stocked bar, complete with brandy in a decanter. A dozen gaps in the neat rows showed where bottles of Scotch or gin or bourbon had been taken. Bane thought this would not make the Brewsters any more docile. He put the Colt down on the bar while he checked his own Smith & Wesson 38 in its holster behind his left hip. The matched silver daggers were sheathed under his sleeves as always and he was as always wearing the flexible silk-thin Trom armor under his clothes. Holding the guard's 45, he opened the inner door to the office and emerged out into the courtroom. In two quick steps, he was standing right behind the man in the judge's chair, pressing the barrel of the Colt to the back of the man's head. As he cocked the weapon, the unmistakable sound froze thirty raucous people into dead silence.
II.
In a split-second, Bane took in the scene. The pews on both sides of the courtroom were occupied by filthy, ragged people eating chicken legs or fast food hamburgers and drinking mostly beer from bottles. At the left table facing the judge's bench were two obese women in stretch pants and glitter-speckled tops. At the other table, tied hand and foot and gagged, was a man in the uniform of a Molino County Sheriff. His face was covered with drying blood and one eye was swollen shut. Looming up behind him was a brute with a shaven head and tattoos running up both beefy arms. He stared at Bane with the open-mouth vacancy of a damaged brain.
The barrel of his Colt was digging into the long, greasy blond hair of a man who wore a denim vest over a ripped T-shirt. Toby, the leader. Like all the Brewsters, his clothing was so stained and threadbare that it was hard to tell what color the vest or shirt had originally been. Feeling something jabbing the back of his head and hearing a hammer pulled back at close range convinced him to be motionless.
Simultaneously, without a signal, some of the men in the pews heaved up onto their feet. Five gunshots exploded so closely together that they sounded like one to the ear, and the Brewsters either flew backwards with their arms flying up over their heads or otherwise doubled up and sagged to the floor.
After a second, Toby Brewster started to turn his head. "Five shots, you're empty mister..."
Bane slugged the killer hard across the top of the head with the gun barrel and then tossed the Colt aside as he drew his Smith & Wesson. "Good thing I brought my own, eh?" To the stupefied crowd, he yelled, "Each of those men was raising a firearm. Anyone else?"
An excited mumbling and whispering ran back and forth through the crowd. Toby Brewster tried to stand up and the Dire Wolf smacked him over the cranium with the gun barrel again, not quite hard enough to knock him out. As this happened, a thin young woman in a yellow dress leaned way over from behind the edge of the pew. Bane snapped off a shot that caught her squarely in the face and she slumped down with the 9mm dropping from her hand.
"You fools had better stay still. My reflexes are better than yours," Bane said as calmly as if he were addressing a PTA meeting.
"Oh my God!" yelled someone from the back. "It's him. It's the Dire Wolf!"
"WHAT? I didn't think he was real. He'll slaughter the whole bunch of us."
In front of Bane, Toby Brewster yelled, "Everyone head for your cars! He can't shoot more than one or two of you before he has to reload and you'll be gone by then---"
"No one is going anywhere in those vehicles out front," Bane announced in a loud clear voice. "Unless you happen to have replacement distributor caps in your pockets. I disabled every vehicle out there."
Desperate now, Toby Brewster threw himself sideways, rolled and came up on his feet with a long-bladed hunting knife thrusting forward. Bane slapped it aside and crashed a short hooking blow with his right fist that flung the killer full length to the floor. Toby moaned but could not rise.
"For the past thirty-six hours, I've been trailing you monsters," the Dire Wolf said. "All over Oklahama. Back and forth across Texas. I found a few of the bodies you left behind, all hacked up. Lots of little kids, I guess they're easier to kill. And when I plotted your activities, I found you would all converge at a certain point tonight. Alkali Wells, not ten miles from the New Mexico border."
As Toby tried to get his hands under him to start to rise, Bane kicked them away so the man dropped face down. "I advise you to hold still," he said. Turning back to the stupefied crowd, he raised his gun and pointed with his free hand at the prisoner. "I want one of you to ungag and untie that man. Nothing funny. If you try a trick, you won't be alive long enough to know it failed."
After a long thirty seconds, one of the older men in the crowd stiffly got up and hobbled over to the sheriff. Like all the Brewsters, he was wearing dirty ragged clothes, including a coat with one sleeve starting to come off. His long tangled grey hair and uneven beard did not add to his appearance. Carefully, he took the duct tape off the prisoner's mouth and started untying the ropes that held the man to the chair.
As soon as the prisoner gulped a few deep breaths, Bane asked, "You're Sheriff Willie Benitez, right?"
"Yes! Yes! Thanks, mister. This freaks were putting me on trial. They were going to hold a trial and then hang me for infringing on their rights." The man's voice was steady. He had nerve.
"I understand you were going to head a special statewide task force to crack down on the Brewster clan," Bane said. "All right, Grandpa," he addressed the older killer, "Go back and sit down where you were." Stepping forward cautiously, moving his gun back and forth over the crowd, the Dire Wolf reached down to pick up a Glock 20 that one of the dead marauders still held. He placed it in front of Benitez without taking his eyes off the mob.
"Sheriff, you make sure that weapon is in proper order," Bane said. "I think I might have to shoot another one or two of these monsters, they're looking unruly."
Moving back up by the judge's post, eyes moving warily over the crowd, the Dire Wolf said, "You guys have been an urban legend in this part of the country for a decade now. There was even a Hollywood movie based on your murder sprees. Okay, now I want just one or two of you to answer this. How many more Brewsters are out there running wild?"
No one spoke up.
"Fine," Bane said. "I'm sure when you're all being interrogated and trying to make plea deals that a few of you will find it expedient to talk. In any case, this is quite a haul. The normal humans of the Southwest will sleep better with you lot facing Death Row."
Benitez got to his feet, stamping one leg to get the circulation going. "This gun is fine, Mr Bane, and it has a full clip."
"More good news. Sheriff, I would like you to move over slightly to your right so we can cover the whole crowd better." Bane was studying the faces before him. "I do see a family resemblance with most of you. Some inbreeding, I bet. From what I've learned, it started with a psychotic named Louise Brewster twenty years ago. She killed her husband and raised her three sons to a nomad life of murder, living off what they took from their victims." He shook his head. "I'm just surprised there are so many of you!"
"More than you realize," laughed a toothless old woman with her hair in a kerchief. "Hell, some of us work regular jobs and lay low until we're needed. We is EVERwhere, just everwhere." Her eyes flickered toward the sheriff.
That gave it away. Benitez had already extended his arm and fired at Bane as the old woman finished speaking. The bullet missed entirely as the Dire Wolf dropped into a crouch and fired back so quickly both shots seemed simultaneous. The 38 slug thumped high into the sheriff's chest and flipped him over backwards.
"None of you move!" Bane roared in a voice he seldom used. He stepped closer to the wounded man, bent and picked up the Glock with his free hand. Still keeping one eye on the crowd of killers, he glanced at Benitez, then bent closer for a second. "Right in the bone," he said. "Looks like no arterial bleeding." He straightened up to coldly survey the mob. "He should survive, assuming the ambulance gets here soon. So. What was the deal with him? Why did you put him on trial?"
Still lying on the floor, clearly unintimidated by everything he had seen, Toby Brewster yelled, "You'll never know, mister. Yer gonna die anyway."
"Oh I've heard that song many times," Bane said. "I suppose it doesn't matter why Benitez was on trial. He must have broken your rules or something. Maybe he just wanted to get away from the likes of you." The Dire Wolf turned to face the twenty remaining killers, some of whom were examining the ones he had shot. "This is going to be some trial. Talk about a circus."
Sirens wailed outside and the courthouse windows were filled with flashing red and blue lights. "There they are now. I called them just before coming into this place. Now I can turn you over to the gentle hands of the Texas Rangers. I doubt if they're all secret Brewsters."
2/20/2016
7/9/1996
I.
At the edge of the back wall of the town court house, Jeremy Bane froze into position. Slowing his breathing to its minimum, he waited until his enhanced hearing kicked in after thirty seconds. The town of Alkali Wells in west Texas was quiet at three in the morning. Somewhere a mile away a dog was barking but that was it. As Bane's hearing tuned up, he made out the labored wheeze of a fat man breathing, then the heavy thump of a heartbeat. The scrape of wood against asphalt... the man was shifting his chair. The Dire Wolf listened for another minute, heard the sound of a yawn and fabric rubbing as the man stretched. Then the breathing slowed down. If the guard was not asleep, he was drowsy.
Taking a deep breath himself, the Dire Wolf straightened up. It was a hot humid night without a breeze and he could understand why the guard was drowsy. Good. Bane had crept through the woods to approach the court house from its blind side. The building was on the outskirts of town, a small brick structure painted white, with a parking lot in front and twin poles upon which the flag of Texas and the flag of the United States flew with lights upon them. In the front parking lot was an SUV, two pick-up trucks and a big old Chevy Malibu. He had already paid these vehicles a visit. All of them were in states of extreme disrepair, with enough damage to make it look as if they had come from a war zone.
Well, he thought to himself, a cross-country killing spree was like a war.
A tall gaunt man in his early forties, dressed all in black, Bane was hard to spot in the gloom in any case. In a narrow intense face, his most notable feature was the pair of pale eyes under heavy brows. Right now they gleamed with a predatory eagerness to get underway. He peered cautiously around the edge of the court house toward its rear lot. In that parking lot was a neatly waxed BMW and a equally gleaming Lexus. They would probably belong to the judge and one of the attorneys. Bane took a second to set himself for action. There was no use in waiting. He swung around the corner of the building and pounced on the guard without hesitation.
The man was short and dumpy, wearing worn-out shoes and pants and flannel shirt, none of which had been washed in a long time. He had frizzy black hair with a big bald spot on top. All this Bane saw in a split-second as he leaped upon the man and smashed a hard backhand to the face that threw the guard up out of his wooden chair as if he had been electrocuted. The man fell in a heap and showed no signs of being able to get up by himself any time soon. Bane stepped closer. The guard wasn't breathing. He turned the man over, saw the glassy staring eyes in the stubble-coated face and realized that he had broken the man's neck with that punch.
A little too much force, the Dire Wolf thought to himself reproachfully. I should have better judgement than that. He found a Colt 45 revolver in the man's belt and examined it. The piece had been cleaned and was in good repair, which slightly surprised him. Five bullets, one empty chamber where the hammer rested. Bane put the gun to one side and skimmed through the man's pockets. Three keys on a paper clip, a loose disorganized wad of twenties and tens, an unlabeled bottle filled with oval white pills with a V-shape on one side. In the shirt pocket were two dried human fingers. Bane held them up to the light. They had belonged to a child no older than seven or eight. Judging from the ends, the fingers had not been cut but ripped off by force.
Replacing the gruesome trophies in the flannel shirt, Bane gazed down coldly at the corpse. The guy was a Brewster all right. Now he didn't feel bad about using excessive force. Picking up the Colt, he checked it out again and then opened the plain yellow metal door that read NO ADMITTANCE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He found himself in a tiny vestibule with wall hooks for coats and rubber mats to scrape off muddy shoes. The door in front of him was unlocked so he simply walked into the judge's chambers.
It was a warm, cozy office with bookcases and overstuffed leather furniture and the smell of Scotch and cigars. On one wall was a white Bison skull. Much of the space was taken up by a desk piled with loose papers and manila envelopes, with two chairs arranged in front of it. Lying face down on that desk was the body of a thin, middle-aged man in shirtleeves. The back of his skull was flattened and coated with dried black blood. That was be the Honorable Harold J Richter, Bane thought. The last thing he had seen in life had been a pack of Brewsters charging into his sanctuary.
Alongside one wall was a nicely stocked bar, complete with brandy in a decanter. A dozen gaps in the neat rows showed where bottles of Scotch or gin or bourbon had been taken. Bane thought this would not make the Brewsters any more docile. He put the Colt down on the bar while he checked his own Smith & Wesson 38 in its holster behind his left hip. The matched silver daggers were sheathed under his sleeves as always and he was as always wearing the flexible silk-thin Trom armor under his clothes. Holding the guard's 45, he opened the inner door to the office and emerged out into the courtroom. In two quick steps, he was standing right behind the man in the judge's chair, pressing the barrel of the Colt to the back of the man's head. As he cocked the weapon, the unmistakable sound froze thirty raucous people into dead silence.
II.
In a split-second, Bane took in the scene. The pews on both sides of the courtroom were occupied by filthy, ragged people eating chicken legs or fast food hamburgers and drinking mostly beer from bottles. At the left table facing the judge's bench were two obese women in stretch pants and glitter-speckled tops. At the other table, tied hand and foot and gagged, was a man in the uniform of a Molino County Sheriff. His face was covered with drying blood and one eye was swollen shut. Looming up behind him was a brute with a shaven head and tattoos running up both beefy arms. He stared at Bane with the open-mouth vacancy of a damaged brain.
The barrel of his Colt was digging into the long, greasy blond hair of a man who wore a denim vest over a ripped T-shirt. Toby, the leader. Like all the Brewsters, his clothing was so stained and threadbare that it was hard to tell what color the vest or shirt had originally been. Feeling something jabbing the back of his head and hearing a hammer pulled back at close range convinced him to be motionless.
Simultaneously, without a signal, some of the men in the pews heaved up onto their feet. Five gunshots exploded so closely together that they sounded like one to the ear, and the Brewsters either flew backwards with their arms flying up over their heads or otherwise doubled up and sagged to the floor.
After a second, Toby Brewster started to turn his head. "Five shots, you're empty mister..."
Bane slugged the killer hard across the top of the head with the gun barrel and then tossed the Colt aside as he drew his Smith & Wesson. "Good thing I brought my own, eh?" To the stupefied crowd, he yelled, "Each of those men was raising a firearm. Anyone else?"
An excited mumbling and whispering ran back and forth through the crowd. Toby Brewster tried to stand up and the Dire Wolf smacked him over the cranium with the gun barrel again, not quite hard enough to knock him out. As this happened, a thin young woman in a yellow dress leaned way over from behind the edge of the pew. Bane snapped off a shot that caught her squarely in the face and she slumped down with the 9mm dropping from her hand.
"You fools had better stay still. My reflexes are better than yours," Bane said as calmly as if he were addressing a PTA meeting.
"Oh my God!" yelled someone from the back. "It's him. It's the Dire Wolf!"
"WHAT? I didn't think he was real. He'll slaughter the whole bunch of us."
In front of Bane, Toby Brewster yelled, "Everyone head for your cars! He can't shoot more than one or two of you before he has to reload and you'll be gone by then---"
"No one is going anywhere in those vehicles out front," Bane announced in a loud clear voice. "Unless you happen to have replacement distributor caps in your pockets. I disabled every vehicle out there."
Desperate now, Toby Brewster threw himself sideways, rolled and came up on his feet with a long-bladed hunting knife thrusting forward. Bane slapped it aside and crashed a short hooking blow with his right fist that flung the killer full length to the floor. Toby moaned but could not rise.
"For the past thirty-six hours, I've been trailing you monsters," the Dire Wolf said. "All over Oklahama. Back and forth across Texas. I found a few of the bodies you left behind, all hacked up. Lots of little kids, I guess they're easier to kill. And when I plotted your activities, I found you would all converge at a certain point tonight. Alkali Wells, not ten miles from the New Mexico border."
As Toby tried to get his hands under him to start to rise, Bane kicked them away so the man dropped face down. "I advise you to hold still," he said. Turning back to the stupefied crowd, he raised his gun and pointed with his free hand at the prisoner. "I want one of you to ungag and untie that man. Nothing funny. If you try a trick, you won't be alive long enough to know it failed."
After a long thirty seconds, one of the older men in the crowd stiffly got up and hobbled over to the sheriff. Like all the Brewsters, he was wearing dirty ragged clothes, including a coat with one sleeve starting to come off. His long tangled grey hair and uneven beard did not add to his appearance. Carefully, he took the duct tape off the prisoner's mouth and started untying the ropes that held the man to the chair.
As soon as the prisoner gulped a few deep breaths, Bane asked, "You're Sheriff Willie Benitez, right?"
"Yes! Yes! Thanks, mister. This freaks were putting me on trial. They were going to hold a trial and then hang me for infringing on their rights." The man's voice was steady. He had nerve.
"I understand you were going to head a special statewide task force to crack down on the Brewster clan," Bane said. "All right, Grandpa," he addressed the older killer, "Go back and sit down where you were." Stepping forward cautiously, moving his gun back and forth over the crowd, the Dire Wolf reached down to pick up a Glock 20 that one of the dead marauders still held. He placed it in front of Benitez without taking his eyes off the mob.
"Sheriff, you make sure that weapon is in proper order," Bane said. "I think I might have to shoot another one or two of these monsters, they're looking unruly."
Moving back up by the judge's post, eyes moving warily over the crowd, the Dire Wolf said, "You guys have been an urban legend in this part of the country for a decade now. There was even a Hollywood movie based on your murder sprees. Okay, now I want just one or two of you to answer this. How many more Brewsters are out there running wild?"
No one spoke up.
"Fine," Bane said. "I'm sure when you're all being interrogated and trying to make plea deals that a few of you will find it expedient to talk. In any case, this is quite a haul. The normal humans of the Southwest will sleep better with you lot facing Death Row."
Benitez got to his feet, stamping one leg to get the circulation going. "This gun is fine, Mr Bane, and it has a full clip."
"More good news. Sheriff, I would like you to move over slightly to your right so we can cover the whole crowd better." Bane was studying the faces before him. "I do see a family resemblance with most of you. Some inbreeding, I bet. From what I've learned, it started with a psychotic named Louise Brewster twenty years ago. She killed her husband and raised her three sons to a nomad life of murder, living off what they took from their victims." He shook his head. "I'm just surprised there are so many of you!"
"More than you realize," laughed a toothless old woman with her hair in a kerchief. "Hell, some of us work regular jobs and lay low until we're needed. We is EVERwhere, just everwhere." Her eyes flickered toward the sheriff.
That gave it away. Benitez had already extended his arm and fired at Bane as the old woman finished speaking. The bullet missed entirely as the Dire Wolf dropped into a crouch and fired back so quickly both shots seemed simultaneous. The 38 slug thumped high into the sheriff's chest and flipped him over backwards.
"None of you move!" Bane roared in a voice he seldom used. He stepped closer to the wounded man, bent and picked up the Glock with his free hand. Still keeping one eye on the crowd of killers, he glanced at Benitez, then bent closer for a second. "Right in the bone," he said. "Looks like no arterial bleeding." He straightened up to coldly survey the mob. "He should survive, assuming the ambulance gets here soon. So. What was the deal with him? Why did you put him on trial?"
Still lying on the floor, clearly unintimidated by everything he had seen, Toby Brewster yelled, "You'll never know, mister. Yer gonna die anyway."
"Oh I've heard that song many times," Bane said. "I suppose it doesn't matter why Benitez was on trial. He must have broken your rules or something. Maybe he just wanted to get away from the likes of you." The Dire Wolf turned to face the twenty remaining killers, some of whom were examining the ones he had shot. "This is going to be some trial. Talk about a circus."
Sirens wailed outside and the courthouse windows were filled with flashing red and blue lights. "There they are now. I called them just before coming into this place. Now I can turn you over to the gentle hands of the Texas Rangers. I doubt if they're all secret Brewsters."
2/20/2016
